THAT WOULD BE AWFUL: Potential citizenship question in 2020 Census could shift power to rural America.

The citizenship question is a particularly fraught one because noncitizens, who may not vote, nonetheless are counted for the purposes of distributing federal funding, apportioning congressional seats and drawing district maps for state and local elections.

A majority of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in just 20 metropolitan areas, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study of Census Bureau data, numbering about 1 million in the New York and Los Angeles areas, 575,000 in Houston and 475,000 in Dallas.

That makes urban leaders, mostly Democrats, alarmed by the possibility of the citizenship question — primarily because census data help guide the distribution of more than $675 billion a year in federal funding.

My heart is not overflowing with sympathy.